Beyond Web VP: New ways of using Lextutor
Marti SevierSimon Fraser University
TESL CanadaOctober 14, 2012
Overview What is Lextutor?
Why? Learning outcomes/rationale
How can it be used? A sequence of tasks
How would you like to use it?
References
Questions/contact
What is Lextutor?
Using LextutorLearning outcomes/rationale
Text analysis: identify vocabulary items for teaching and learning
Practice based on… Multiple exposures Multiple, authentic contexts Opportunities for deep processing
Expansion of vocabulary knowledge:
Meaning in different contexts Word families Collocation Register Grammatical associations (colligation) Etc.
Background: A brief word about word lists
GSL: 1953, West, rev. 1995, Bauman & Culligan –2000 headwords
UWL: 1984, Xue & Nation AWL: 2000, Coxhead 570 headwords BNL: 2005, Neufeld & Billuroglu—
2709 words BNC-20: 2010, Cobb—20,000 words
Background: corporaWhat is a corpus?
A corpus is a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language
presented in electronic form. It provides the evidence of how
language is used in real situations, from which lexicographers can
write accurate and meaningful dictionary entries. By analysing the
corpus and using special software, we can see words in context and
find out how new words and senses are emerging, as well as
spotting other trends in usage, spelling, world English, and so on.
Source: About the Oxford English Corpus, http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/aboutcorpus
Corpora and word lists GSL: partially corpus-based but also compilation of
words voted upon by committee --2000 words UWL: compilation of 4 lists: Lynn (1973), Campion
and Elley (1971), (corpus-based), and Ghadessy (1979), and Praninskas (1972) (lists based on student annotations of words in texts).
AWL: corpus-based: academic texts in arts, commerce, law, and science (3.5 million running words)
BNL: based on commonly used word lists which are corpus-based, the Brown Corpus (1 m. words from range of written sources), and the British National Corpus (BNC) (100 million words from written and spoken sources)
BNC-20: based on British National Corpus
How can Lextutor be used? A sequence of tasks
1. KeyWords, WebVP: identify words for study
2. ID output: word recognition, spelling3. Cloze: meaning, context, collocation,
colligation4. Familizer: word families5. Concordancer: collocation, text
patterns6. GroupLex: all of the above...and more
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze
Text analysis tools: selecting words1. KeyWords Extractor
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze
Text analysis tools: selecting words1. KeyWords Extractor
22 key words (proper nouns eliminated)
freshwater maritime drought province navigate bureau lake river species pollute ship fish factory reach water previous city continue short include direct total
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--1
Text analysis tools: selecting wordsWeb Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--1
Text analysis tools: selecting wordsWeb Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)AWL GSL K1: city continue direct factory fish
include lake reach river ship short total water
GSL: K2: 0AWL: previous OFF LIST: bureau drought freshwater
maritime navigate pollute province species
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--2
Text analysis tools: selecting words: the BNL
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--2
Text analysis tools: selecting wordsBNLbnl-1 city continue direct include previous reach
short total water bnl-2 factory river ship bnl-3 fish lake bnl-4 decline bnl-5 central meters statistics bnl-6 species OFF LIST freshwater maritime drought province
navigate bureau pollute
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--3
Text analysis tools: selecting words: the BNC-20
Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--3
BNC-20 BNC 1000: city continue direct fish include
previous short total water BNC-2,000: factory reach river ship BNC-3,000: lake pollute species BNC-4,000: bureau province BNC-5,000: drought BNC-6,000: navigate BNC-8,000: maritime
A couple of caveats:
Infrequent ≠ difficult/necessary Teacher knowledge is key Curricular/syllabus demands
12 words…
drought maritime navigation reaches factories species bureau levels include continue director pollute
Application 1: I-D Word identification quiz
Rationale: Word recognition/spelling Increases speed of recognition Provides multiple contexts for words
Application 2: rational cloze passage
Why cloze? learners appear to like it, and [it can] train learners to read and rewrite
a text with a vocabulary focus (Lee, 2008)
Requires reader to use contextual clues to fill in gaps (Raymond, 1988)
…and a second cloze Video cloze
Caveat: keep length short, about 2-3 minutes How to:
Go to page source, search “embedurl” (no quotes) Copy the link without quotation marks and paste
into create page
Application 3: A word and more words: familizer
… rather than talking about “knowing a word”, we should be talking about “knowing a word family” (Nation 2001:47).
========================12 words: drought maritime navigation
reaches factories species bureau levels include continue director pollute
Familizer output
12 words: drought maritime navigation drastic reaches factories statistics species decline percent bureau levels marine chemical director
76 bureau bureaus continue continual continually continuance continued continuity continues continuing continuous continuously continuation continuations direct directed undirected directing directly director directors directorship directorships directs indirect indirectly directness directnesses drought droughts factory factories include included includes including incl inclusive inclusion level levelled leveller levelling leveled leveler leveling levels levelly maritime navigate navigated navigating navigates navigation navigations navigational navigator navigators circumnavigate circumnavigates circumnavigated circumnavigating circumnavigation pollute pollutes polluted polluting polluter polluters pollutant pollutants pollution pollutions antipollution reach reached reaches reaching species
Application 4: the concordancer
Collocation: “two or more words that occur frequently together” (Shin & Nation, 2007, 41)
Why?1. develop greater fluency2. Achieve “naturalness”, e.g.
“do my best” vs. “try my best”
Concordancer
Our word list again: drought maritime navigation drastic reaches factories statistics species decline percent bureau levels marine chemical director
Compare collocation in the passage to collocation in a concordancer
Concordancer: language analysis
What are two different meanings of “reaches” in the passage? Water in the upper reaches decreased by
over 60 percent from the previous year… ….. in the middle reaches of the river. Water depth at Yichang and Jingjiang in the
middle reaches of the river no longer reaches the navigation standard of 2.9 meters
Which use is more common?Compare to the concordance lines.
Concordancer: “reaches” Out of 53 concordance lines, only about
10% use “reaches” as it is used in the passage.
Questions for students to consider” Part of speech: noun or verb? If a noun: singular or plural? Context: in what type of texts might ths
word be used? To what topics is it related?
Note: use “all of the above under “Corpus”.
Concordancer: comparison Ask Ss to check collocations by typing into
concordancerX Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological
harm. OR Collect common collocation errors: mix with
correct collocations: use “extract” to pull up examples.
We then run the risk of being injured.Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological
harm.A message runs … a risk of being distorted if it is to be relayed
more than about six..times.
NOTE: Consider whether you are looking for a collocation to the left or to the right of the word. Here it is “left” because we want to look at the word/s that FOLLOW risk.
Putting it together: GroupLex
Student-driven learning – New or recycled vocabulary– Interactive: Ss set quizzes in pairs, trade– Personalized: focus on “their” area– Multiconc option: increased exposure,
contexts– Easy to monitor– Contact Tom Cobb to set up a site for your
students.
Now you try it / Questions?
After thoughts
Marti’s contact: [email protected] Tom Cobb’s contact:
[email protected] (for Grouplex setup—takes about a week)
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